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I own a Single page application (web) displaying a list of items.
Each item represents an announcement, imagine for example some bids.

A user can list the current bids, and click on one of them in order to display the "show" page, showing the bids in detail.

How to handle the user navigation between different views of bid?

When he clicks on browser's back button (or an appropriate return button), I would expect the application to refresh the bids list, in case where title, or prices etc.. were updated, or even new bids added that would lead to sort again the list.

More precisely, should I adopt a pagination mechanism (splitting pages through numbers), or a scroll infinite mechanism?

The issue I notice with scroll infinite would be that it would be incompatible with bids list refresh.
Indeed, if my loading rule was to load 20 items per 20 items, if the user clicks on the 190th, a back leading to a refresh would only retrieve the first 20 items. User would still be forced to scroll until he finds the 191th item => sounds very bad, regarding UX.
On the other hand, a scroll is easily retainable when dealing with classical pagination mechanism, (like Ebay does for instance).

IMHO, Scroll infinite would be relevant if the list was not refreshed during this user's use case of navigation (since I could retain the current scroll position) or if the "bid detail" page would be opened in another window/tab of browser.

Am I wrong? What would be a good practice in this case?

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    I am sorry if this is a little rude, but I am having a hard time figuring out what it is you want exactly. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I interpret your question as following: 1: You want advice on whether to use infinite scrolling or pagination for your bidding website? -- 2: Your bidding website has different items that you can bid on in a very big list? -- 3: Once you bid on an item, you get redirected back to the home screen, and thus lose your overview of the item you made a bid on?
    – JonSpr
    Jun 1, 2014 at 14:25
  • @JonSpr E-X-A-C-T-L-Y :) You've well interpreted.
    – Mik378
    Jun 1, 2014 at 14:28
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    If you do go with infinite scrolling make sure you don't have a footer, as you'll never bee able to click it.
    – James Wilkinson
    Jun 2, 2014 at 17:16
  • @JamesWilkinson Nice point :) Indeed.
    – Mik378
    Jun 2, 2014 at 17:20
  • You should design two versions and test this. We cannot give you valid answer on this as this is a big debate in usability: pagination vs scrooling. The best thing you can do is create two versions and make A/B test to see which of them performs better.
    – Kristiyan Lukanov
    Feb 11, 2016 at 8:03

2 Answers 2

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Allright, in that case I have the following suggestions:

  1. First of all, make a list of items the user had bid on. That way he can always find his way back to the items he is interested in. Or maybe a 'saved' list if a user wants to come back to an item, but hasn't placed a bid yet.
  2. Second, have a look at how people in This article combine pagination and infinite scrolling. I already suggested it to someone on this website before, but I really think this is a very elegant solution to any infinite scrolling/ pagination issue.

This way, a user can quickly go back to the page he was on (and share this exact page to friends for example), but still have the enjoyment that infinite scrolling gives.

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  • Very nice solution, but I think that it's pretty new and most lambda users (non-comfortable with web) would not understand the mix (my own mother would think that the page 1 is enormous, she wouldn't notice the dynamic switching of pages as user scrolls). I prefer to go with simple navigation and analyse user's behaviour. Thanks a lot :)
    – Mik378
    Jun 1, 2014 at 16:06
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Use pagination by default and only switch to infinite scroll if Javascript is enabled.

Consider that some users will have javascript disabled, and it'd be nice if your site worked for them too. Typically this is not the case when infinite scroll is the only option. However, you can make it work for everyone and just give the JS users a smoother experience, if you think about it a bit.

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